Urine trouble

I was most disappointed to read, in your otherwise excellent magazine, that you chose to report the fake news masquerading as a ‘statistic’ regarding urine released in a swimming pool (May, p82).

Surely that statistic is unverifiable and would actually require most of us (we!) swimmers to be incontinent? I suspect the ‘news’ was released to the media by a pathological non-swimmer who has had to endure taking his kids to early morning swimming lessons!

Conversely, and perhaps more worthy of your attention, all swimming pools are checked daily, by water sample, for faecal contamination (not for urine) and therefore it should be possible to work out exactly how much poo is floating about in the average swimming pool in a day. An ideal project for that intern, surely?

Keep up the good work, I find the articles on particle physics most enjoyable. Richard Graham, Aberdeenshire Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the statistic – that 75 litres of urine was ‘released’ in a large pool over a three-week period – came from a study published in the journal Environmental Science

& Technology Letters. They tested a public pool for traces of artificial sweeteners, as these aren’t metabolised by the body as they pass through. – Ed